How do visitors REALLY use your site?

If you maintain or market a website, you’re probably all too familiar with web analytics reports that tell you how your site is generally used.  Information is generally presented in sums and averages, and you’re getting a very statistical presentation of how your site is used.  You can (and should) segment how you review your data to gain more insight and get valuable information, but if you really want to know how users interact withyour site, you’ll have to go beyond your analytics dashboard.

There’s a few ways you can go about it, many of which are expensive.  Before going to the alternatives below, you’ll want to reach out and see what it costs to hire a firm to do in-person usability testing.  Depending on your scale, ‘expensive’ may very well not be.  And, in no way am I suggesting that we devalue what professional usability professionals do.  That said, here are a couple of other options that you can consider:

The $49 usability lab

If you have an employee who has done usability testing before, what you might have a hard time justifying the price of the equipment to perform the tests.  Consider the costs of it would take to do set up a lab:

• Computer(s)
• Video camera
• Usability testing software (usually VERY expensive)
• Video editing software
• …

Well, if you have a Macintosh, there might be another option for you.  A company called Clearleft has created a usability testing program called Silverback for Macintoshes running OS X.  Current (and most recent) Macs (barring the Mini) come with a video camera and a mic built in, so insofar as hardware if you have the Mac, you’re almost there, you just need the software.  The cost?  Free to try, $49 to buy.  The video below provides an introduction to Silverback.

Much less personal

There’s another option that provides a far more limited view, but one that still has plenty of value.  If your situation is that you…

• want to analyze how a large number of users interact with a single page, flow or site but don’t need the human-to-human interaction
• and/or need some ammunition to convince the boss of the potential of real-user testing
• and/or can’t afford to do testing another way

You might try another option.  It doesn’t allow you to guide the user, prompt them with exactly what you want them to do, or to gather facial expressions or what they say while using the site.  The service is called ClickTale. What does it do?  For starters it records user sessions and allows you to play them back. Here’s a video from ClickTale:

After installing a few scripts on your website the service provides

• Movies which track you visitors’ behavior
• Scrolling heatmaps showing how far visitors scroll
• Element interaction, hover, hesitation time
• Form field interaction

This is obviously a different type of solution, but depending on your needs it might do the trick.  ClickTale has a limited free version and paid plans starting at $59/month for up to 10 domains (if you pre-pay annually).

Tagged as: ClickTag, Silverback, Usability Testing